Mercy (66 page)

“But it’s nothing to me,” she said. “The lie. It’s all the same to me, all of it…all the same.”

She was only a step from the top, maybe fifteen feet away, close enough for Broussard to see her face clearly and the effort she was making to control it. The dress was most likely a cotton jersey, a beautiful thing, the sort of stylish garment that Mary Lowe possessed by the closets full.

She approached him across the small distance, and he saw her face more clearly in the weak light coming from behind him. She stopped in front of him, her legs slightly parted, and the sound of crickets came up from between them like a birthing of cunning music. Her cheeks quivered as she made an effort at smiling, and he tried to read her eyes, to decipher what she must be thinking as she looked at him, and he looked at her through a purple haze of wine and from behind the woman in white leaves.

“There are bound to be mistakes,” she said, for no reason that he could imagine. And for no reason, he nodded.

“How long do you think I should have let him come to my bed at nights?” she asked, and she slowly sank to her knees and walked on them until she touched him. She put a hand on either side of his skirt and began pushing it up. “All through my twelfth year? Until I was thirteen? Fourteen?” She was working the skirt past the top of the stockings, past the garter belt, above his
fleur-de-lis
panties, and finally, free and around his waist. “Fifteen?”

Broussard was going wild inside. How many times had he dreamed and yearned for this to happen to him, for these clothes—the satin surfaces of silk and nylon and lace, the tiny ribbing on the panties, the buckles and snaps, the colors of flesh through colors of lingerie—to be taken from him as she was now taking them. He felt the garter belt give way on each leg and he felt her fingers go into the tops of his stockings and peel them off, like a skin, the heavy air of the bayou night refreshing on the lengths of his newly naked legs.

His eyes closed, and his mind’s eye followed the removal of his garter belt and panties. He loved the way his face must have looked to her.

“Sixteen? Seventeen?”

And then there was nothing left below his waist but his excitement.

“But there was one more surprise,” she said, and Broussard heard her voice move and he opened his eyes. “There came the time—and I was twelve, still twelve—of the worst part. The worst part of it all.”

Standing before him, she began unbuttoning the cotton jersey from the top and when she reached the last button her eyes were riveted to him like Bernadine’s, the way he liked, wide open to the things that they would do. A small shrug of her white shoulders sent the jersey falling to her feet, and she stood in front of him as he had often imagined her with a body so remarkably perfect that it was a pure thing, as pure as death.

She stepped up to him, placed one hand on each of his shoulders to steady herself, and then raised one naked leg and slipped it through the inside of the arm of the chair and then swiftly raised the other one and placed it through the other arm, straddling him.

“The worst part of it was,” she said, taking him in her hand, slowly settling onto him, and leaning down until he felt her heavy breasts against his chest, until he felt her lips feathering his ear, until he felt the warmth of her breath, warmer than the bayou air. “The worst part of all…was the night my daddy came to me in my bed…and I enjoyed it.”

SEVENTH DAY

52

Sunday, June 4

S
aturday night at Ben Taub General Hospital, the city’s largest charity hospital, located on the northern border of the Texas Medical Center, is like a war zone—every Saturday night. Janice Hardeman, a surgical nurse in one of the hospital’s emergency operating rooms, had been pulling the night shift at the hospital five nights a week for over five years, and during that time she had seen a lot of human damage. But the immediate satisfaction she received from helping trauma patients, stunned and bewildered by finding themselves suddenly in the red midst of a life-threatening tragedy, was more than enough compensation for the spent adrenaline and the constant visions of human slaughter that all too frequently approached the absurd.

By three o’clock this Sunday morning Janice Hardeman had assisted while surgeons removed an icepick embedded in a twenty-two-year-old woman’s left breast, its tip passing through her left lung and coming to rest one and a half centimeters from the exterior wall of her heart’s right ventricle. She had assisted in an unsuccessful effort to save the life of a woman who had received a single gunshot wound in the stomach, which had exploded her pancreas and celiac artery. She had run down the hospital’s long, shiny halls beside a stainless-steel gurney with her right thumb jammed into a man’s slashed throat, trying to stanch the hemorrhaging of his right carotid artery; she had delivered by cesarean section a cocaine-addicted baby from its mother, who was dying of crack-induced convulsions; she had assisted in the removal of a four-year-old boy’s left arm, which had been crushed in a car wreck; and now she was going home early because her period had started and the cramps that had begun plaguing her during her last four or five periods were making it impossible for her to stay on her feet any longer.

With her shoes squeaking on the polished floors, she left the nurses’ lounge thankful that she wasn’t the little boy’s mother and didn’t have to tell him about his arm when he woke up in the morning. And she was worried about her cramps. Her periods always had been easy, even from the very beginning, but lately they had begun to be unusually painful. The cramps only lasted the first eighteen or twenty hours—she had made mental notes about the duration—but they were unusually sharp. Or so it seemed. She really had nothing to compare them with.

Walking out the back door of the hospital, the smell of hot asphalt and oil-stained parking lots replaced the hospital odors of alcohol and disinfectant. There was a faint waft of something rancid coming from the Dumpsters at the far end of the building, and Janice felt a sudden momentary queasiness. She recognized the irony and laughed to herself. Blood and vomit and urine and feces hadn’t fazed her for the past six hours, but the smell of rotten fruit was too much.

She hurried across the lot to her car and stood by the door, fishing her keys out of her purse. She usually remembered to have her keys ready when she left the building to avoid this delay in the deserted lot, but tonight she had forgotten, the little boy and the cramps taking their toll on her concentration. The predawn air was cool and Janice was thankful that every day she was able to experience these early-morning hours. You could almost understand the city when you saw it like this. With the millions of tiny glistening lights coming from the looming buildings of the surrounding complex, she saw the city at its best. It wasn’t always harsh and hectic and mean and hot It wasn’t always merciless.

Getting inside her new Toyota, Janice locked the doors and then pushed the buttons that rolled each of the windows down a few inches. She pulled out of the hospital parking lot and onto the loop that took her to the Outer Belt, the boulevard that separated the north side of the Texas Medical Center from the south side of Hermann Park and the Houston Zoo just through the trees. She took the Outer Belt to Main Street across from Rice University and turned left and followed along beside the campus until she got to University Boulevard, where she turned right and headed into the empty streets toward the quiet village of West University Place.

She lived alone in the southwest quadrant of the village, just inside its limits. Having recently split up with her boyfriend, she was enjoying her newly recovered privacy, not having to worry about looking out for another person’s clothes—either clean or dirty—or another person’s books or records or combs or socks or favorite cookies or bicycle or breakfast cereal. Everything was hers again, only hers, and she knew where she put things and why. If she got lonely she would have a friend over, or she would go over to a friend’s without having to worry about whether he was going to feel excluded or, if he went along, whether their personalities were going to clash or if he might decide to be boorish because he hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, but didn’t have the resourcefulness to stay at home alone and entertain himself for a change. In short, she was once again enjoying the pleasures of selfishness.

Just as she turned into her street, she met the paperboy tossing white rolls of newspaper through the morning darkness into dew-dampened yards, and with her windows down she heard faint whumps as an occasional paper hit a tree or slammed into front porch steps. She pulled into her driveway, rolled up the windows, and got out and locked the car. Exhausted, she walked across the damp grass, picked up her newspaper, and walked up the sidewalk to the front door of her small wood-frame house. It was painted a light green with forest green trim and forest green canvas awnings. She had mortgaged the house with her own salary, had it made energy-efficient on a payment plan. She mowed the small lawn herself. She was proud of the place and liked the neighborhood.

Unlocking the front door, she pushed it open, kicked off her white nursing shoes, and tossed the newspaper over onto the sofa across the small living room. She would look at it right there in that spot in a few hours, with a cinnamon roll from the neighborhood bakery and a nice strong cup of coffee. But right now all she wanted was to take a long shower with lots of scented soap to wash off the emergency room odors, and then to crawl between the cool sheets.

Unbuttoning the blouse of her white uniform, she stepped across the small hallway off the living room and turned the corner into her bedroom. The moment before she flipped on the light, she smelled the perfume—not her perfume. That simple fact registered like a cold blade of fear going into the back of her neck at the very same instant that the ceiling light flung up the naked, pasty cadaver of a woman in her bed, her face painted like a great grotesque doll, eyes staring round and bulging, bloody breasts, and a queerly refined and proper posture.

Prim horror.

The telephone rang four or five times before Palma fought her way to the surface of consciousness and groped for the receiver. As she said, “This is Carmen,” she saw that the digital clock read three fifty-five.

“You’re man’s done another one,” Lieutenant Corbeil said.

“Jesus Christ.” Her mouth was dry, and Corbeil’s words had the effect of the first roiling sensations of nausea. “What…what about Reynolds?”

“He didn’t move.”

Palma swallowed. “He didn’t move? He…what about Broussard?” She was holding her head in her hand. “Did they get the tail on Broussard?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t go anywhere either,” Corbeil said.

Palma was incredulous. “Are they sure? I mean, who was on him?”

“Martin and Hisdale, but I don’t think I’d question their…”

“Goddamn, Arvey, it was just a question.” God, how could it not be either one of them?

“And there’s something odd about your victim,” Corbeil said. Palma was irritated that Corbeil kept saying “your man” and “your victim.” Why the hell had he started that? “Victim doesn’t live in the house where she was found. Place belongs to a single woman, a nurse who found her when she came in from her shift at Ben Taub about twenty minutes ago.”

“She doesn’t know the victim?” Palma asked, sitting up on the edge of the bed, looking at her wrinkled dress, trying to remember.

“Says she doesn’t know if she does or not. Couldn’t tell with the makeup and all,” Corbeil said. “Thirty-twenty-six Blane. Practically in your own back yard.”

“Jesus Christ,” Palma said again. “Okay, I’m on my way as soon as I wash up.”

“Say,” Corbeil said quickly, “you know where Grant is? I’ve called his room at the hotel, but he doesn’t answer.”

“I don’t know,” she said crossly. “Try it again.” She hung up and ran her fingers through her hair, cursing Corbeil’s impertinence. Or she thought it was impertinence. She stood up slowly and went into the bathroom and washed her face with cold water, came out patting her face with a towel, ran a brush through her hair, and started down the stairs, still dabbing at her face. She went into the living room and saw their plates still on the coffee table, and then she turned and went across the hall to the guest room. The door was open and she stepped in and saw Grant standing at the bathroom sink in his suit pants but without a shirt, washing his face.

“I listened on the telephone down here,” he said quickly, turning off the water. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

She stared at him. When she didn’t leave the doorway, he turned and looked at her.

“You all right?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, holding the towel to her mouth. “I don’t remember going up to bed.”

“I carried you up,” he said, trying to act as if it was nothing, quickly turning back to the mirror to comb his hair. “You kind of conked out.”

“I passed out?”

“I’d say you just went to sleep.”

Palma looked at him a moment. “I, uh, I don’t drink too well,” she said.

“I’m sorry you had to sleep in your dress,” Grant said, striding out of the bathroom and grabbing his shirt from the back of a chair near his bed. Palma noticed his bed had been slept in. She also noticed his build, surprised at the thickness of his chest and shoulders. He slipped on the shirt and hurriedly started buttoning it. “But I thought…you’d rather.”

Palma nodded. “Right,” she said stupidly. “It’ll take me just a second to throw on some fresh things.” And she turned and hurried out of the room.

Blane Street was not exactly in Palma’s back yard, as Corbeil put it, but it was eighteen blocks away, just inside the city limits of West University Place. As with the murder of Bernadine Mello in Hunters Creek, the village police were well aware of the serial killings and contacted Houston homicide immediately. Because of their proximity, Palma and Grant were the first ones there except for several radio units, their doors flung open, radios barking, flashers bouncing off the small neighboring houses in the predawn darkness.

“Stop back here,” Grant said quickly, and Palma slowed and pulled to the curb, cutting her lights and stopping several car lengths back from the house. Grant quickly got out of the car and stalked toward the house, reaching for his shield to hang outside his suit coat pocket. He headed straight for the patrolman stringing plastic ribbon around the entire perimeter of the yard to the front sidewalk.